I messaged Ronson about his car’s absence at Go Garage, having visited twice since he announced his intention to sell the car and organised the chariot to go on consignment at the Chullora workshop.
To me he wanted to part with the car, but the emotional ties held him back. It wasn’t just his car, it was his family’s. I firmly believed it wouldn’t be moved on, he’d keep it and find a way to put it in storage, freeing up space for another toy.
“So you decided against selling hey? Good decision.” I remarked. Ronson texted back almost immediately, “I sold it to my friend hahaha”.
Strange, the premise for us getting the photoshoot done for the Evo was part of the inevitable, the final photos while the car was in Ronson’s possession, but his decisiveness in getting rid of it actually made me sad when he noted that it was no longer his.
Ronson purchased his Evo seven years ago when his oldest child was only one. Bone stock, he claimed with much conviction, “I bought it because the Evolution is a family car”. He followed this by sending over his first ever photo of the car, on the hoist with lip extensions, sporting a 57OCK number plate.
Clear intentions then, Ronson simply wanted to keep the JDM in his life, he entered a new chapter where modification wasn’t the focal point to the experience, the vehicle’s heritage and brand philosophy was.
Or so he thought. His second son was born shortly after his purchase, and it wasn’t long before he found the “need” to build on the CT9A’s foundation:
“I went for a drive with wife and boys in the car down to Cronulla, was turning onto Bangor Bypass casually then I heard a boxer engine chasing me down with loud BOV shifting gears. So I downshifted to 2nd to pull out the corner, then he just ripped past me.”
Two years later and only a couple years into ownership Ronson had more or less completed the build you see on this feature. Handling first, and an engine build created with reliable track use in mind, Ronson’s parts list is pure JDM porn.
Four doors, an appreciating asset entering the 2020s and a vehicle with an ownership journey that mirrors the owner’s responsibilities in raising a young family, this particular Evo looked destined to be the forever car in the Choi family. If dad wasn’t driving it was inevitable that both of his boys would be.
Nonetheless, it’s now gone and Ronson has more reasons than calling it his mid-life crisis. He’s already looking hard for a replacement, the daily drivers have been sorted so he’s done a 180 to focus on securing a car with half the doors, even while the kids are growing every day.
“I wasn’t spending enough time driving the car”, Ronson lamented, “but then I never felt safe taking the car out”. It’s an attitude that has spread amongst owners of clean builds. These were cheap(er) vehicles once upon a time with competitive performance to a supercar, but as prices skyrocketed over the past eighteen months, so have the number of people looking for something to gain.
As JDM enters the vernacular for your everyday enthusiast, the demand globally makes cars like Ronson’s old steed a target for scum looking to profit off another man’s pride and joy. The root of all evil rearing its ugly head again, compounding an existing risk that Ronson wasn’t willing to face, given the frequency he’d like to be using his weekend toy.
The difficulty in finding an appropriate, safe circumstance to drive killed Ronson’s freedom to drive. It took him two years to run in the stroker build, the brand new 9RS gearbox sourced early on has just under five thousand kilometres during his ownership, In a blink of an eye you’ve completed an entire part of your life without much to show for your investment into an expensive passion.
I think it’s commendable how quickly Ronson moved the Evo on, despite the various emotional strings attached. For modification fiends, the connection to a car goes much further than the journeys you’ve been on and the events attended with said vehicle. It’s the accumulation of a number of resources, much of which you will never get back.
Modification can be an escape, it can be an all-consuming project, but also a perpetual sunk cost in which we often think, “I can’t sell this, I’ve done too much and made too many memories with it”.
In Cantonese there is a saying that roughly translates to “good intentions made us do bad things”, in many instances I think it rings true for a modder’s life. You want to keep enjoying the project that you’ve completed, or you don’t want all your efforts and investment go to waste.
But like most relationships in life what that means is that too often, you hold onto it for too long, preventing you from moving on and experiencing new things, opportunities that will come and go without being taken advantage of. Very pertinent for car modification, since so much of it makes a car more focused and less suitable for everyday use.
Ronson could’ve easily held onto his complete, built CT9A for another decade, reminiscing as it sits in the garage collecting dust how his family loved taking it out for a spin, or the tales of sourcing bespoke parts from Japan. Instead he understands what truly would give him happiness in the now, the ability to easily recreate those memories with his wife and kids and working on new memories together more frequently and in a manner that he feels comfortable with.
Life is a book: there is a start and an end, and the chapters throughout direct where the narrative goes. Previous chapters give context to the current ones, which open up the possibilities for where the story goes next, and so forth.
It’d be a pretty shit book if all the chapters told the same story!
